Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/92

82 yet be the product of a conscious, highly elaborated literary art, like Virgil's "Æneid." Or again, while celebrating a lofty theme, it may be the deeply personal expression of the poet's own interpretation of experience and the world, as with Dante and Milton. In lesser compass than the epic, a narrative poem, like the ballads or the more conscious poetical romances and tales, may range over the whole wide domain of men's adventures and fortunes, finding nothing human foreign to it.

Narrative thus stories forth the doings of others; the lyric rises out of oneself. And here again the scope is limitless. A lyric may phrase emotion in its purest essence: it is then the absolute lyric or song. The emotion, gathering about a simple little scene in nature, may utter itself briefly and beautifully in an idyl; conceived on a more extensive scale, a poem of rustic life, actual or feigned, becomes a pastoral. The passion of grief finds voice in the elegy. A lyric may mirror the large aspects of nature as colored by the poet's feeling, and so it passes over into descriptive poetry. Sensuous elements may be subordinated to thought or to sympathy; and the poem so inspired expresses reflection and sentiment. Exaltation of thought and mood, moving through sustained and complex metrical form, finds a fitting medium in the ode. Even wit and satire, if feeling mingle with the intellectual element, are not outside the scope of poetical expression, as in the epigram. Poetry also provided only that it still be poetry may be didactic. Although the true function of poetry, as of all art, is not to teach, but to interpret life beautifully, to touch the heart and kindle the whole being to heightened activity, yet a poem may voice moral ideas, as in Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty":

Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear

The Godhead's most benignant grace;

Nor know we anything so fair

As is the smile upon thy face: